Ju Ming

Biography

In 1976 Ju Ming’s first solo exhibition opened at the National Museum of History in Taipei. His teacher, the sculptor Yuyu Yang, had persuaded the museum authorities to show his student’s work. The China Times devoted a series of articles to the show, running for five days in a row. His wooden figures of peasants and herd boys came to be seen as a symbol of the Taiwan Nativist Movement of the 1970s.

He was thirty-eight then.

He was born on 20 January 1938 in Tunghsiao (Miaoli County, Shinchiku Prefecture), in the Japanese period of Taiwan’s history. His original name was Ju Chuan Tai. He was the youngest in a large family, and in childhood he was called Jiu Er, “ninety-two”: the sum of his parents’ ages in the year he was born. At fifteen he became an apprentice to a local woodcarver, Lee Chin-chuan, who worked at the temple of the Empress of Heaven, the sea goddess Mazu. By day he carved wood, and by night he practised drawing. Later he recalled his master’s saying that a sculptor who cannot draw is like an architect who can build houses but cannot make a blueprint. An artisan, he said, differs from an artist in copying other people’s manner.

In 1959 Ju Ming finished his apprenticeship and opened his own studio in Tunghsiao, with apprentices of his own. The crafts business did well but left him dissatisfied. In 1961 he married Chen Fu-mei, a fellow townswoman; one of his well-known early works, “A Girl Playing Sand”, was modelled on her. He began sending pieces to competitions and won several awards at the prestigious Taiwan Provincial Art Exhibition: in 1966 for “Attractive to Each Other”, and in 1967 third prize for “Long Separation”.

In 1968 he took these works to Yuyu Yang and asked to be taken on as a pupil. Yang agreed, and Ju Ming became his student. By some accounts the training lasted about eight years; in 1969 he settled in the neighbourhood of Banqiao, near Taipei. From his teacher he took the habit of throwing away accumulated technique and holding on to the general shape of the form. In 1976, on Yang’s advice, he took up tai chi, and from that practice grew the Taichi series: figures in which form is reduced to a minimum and movement is carried by the mass of the wood. In the same year he received an arts award from the Chinese Cultural Arts Association and was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Persons of Taiwan, and in December the National Award of Literature and Arts.

His work was first shown abroad in 1977, at the Tokyo Central Art Museum: twenty-eight wooden pieces from the Taichi series. In 1980 he went to New York. He said that Pop Art struck him as close to his own attitude to work, and that this convinced him that his new cycle, the Living World, was the right path: bright figures in bronze, stainless steel, painted wood and foam rubber, in which the human body is shown in all its varieties. In 1981 and 1983 he exhibited at the Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York. In 1984 his exhibitions took place in Manila and Bangkok, later in Singapore and Hong Kong; for the Bank of China building in Hong Kong, designed by the architect Ieoh Ming Pei, he made a sculpture from the Taichi series.

In 1991 his work was seen in Europe: at the Southbank Centre in London he was the only Asian artist invited, and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Dunkirk showed the Living World. A retrospective followed in 1995 at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, an exhibition at Place Vendôme in Paris in 1997, then shows in Luxembourg and Brussels, and in Berlin in 2003. His “Gate of Wisdom” (in Chinese, Zhongmen) stands in front of the library of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In 1987 he began preparing the construction of a museum of his own at Jinshan, in the north of the island, and took part himself in planning the grounds and in the building work. The Ju Ming Museum opened in 1999 and the same year won the Tokyo Creation Award. In 2000 he completed the Taichi series with the abstract “Taichi Arch”. In 2005 he showed in Taipei “Living World: The Armed Forces”, in which more than three hundred soldier figures were deployed like an army. From 2007 he began making the Living World figures white, saying that from then on he would paint his sculpture only in white.

His awards include the Enku Grand Award in Gifu (2002), an honorary doctorate from Fu Jen Catholic University (2003), the Executive Yuan Cultural Award (2004), the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize (2007) and the Presidential Cultural Award (2019). In 2014 the Hong Kong Museum of Art held the exhibition “Ju Ming: Sculpting the Living World”. He died in Taipei on 22 April 2023, aged 85.